advice congress, to assist researchers for benefit from its exhaustive collection. if confirmed, it would be my privilege to join the dedicated staff and supporters of the library. to ensure that its treasures are secured and shared for many years to come. >> the senate has yet to set a date to vote on her confirmation. >> when i tune in on the weekends usually it's authors sharing their new releases. >> watching the nonfiction authors on book tb is the best television for serious readers. >> on c-span they can have a longer conversation and delve into their subjects. book tv weekends, they bring you author after author, after author. they spotlight the work of fascinating people. >> i love book tb and i am a c-span fan.

[inaudible] [inaudible] >> we are excited to be here tonight and to have lisa cut thomas in conversation with louisa hall about her new book. searching american biography. louisa hall is the author of two novels, who is thomas first book, conscious and examines the clash between soldiers in world

war i. it was called daring by the new york times. joseph j ellis said of louisa, the extraordinary life of adams, for a a long time i have been waiting for a biographer with a different style an emotional range to tell the extraordinary story of lisa, catherine adams and also wonder and sadness. please join me in welcoming louisa and louisa. [applause]. >> hello everyone. thank you for coming. i am so happy to be here to talk about this book. also happy to be part of this book for louisa. if you like many other louisa's may have been chosen but i'm flattered to be the one.

this book also is one of my favorite books that i have read this year. i'd love it very deeply. not just because of the pleasures of reading about someone with my own name, but also because i just found that as a biography it was more deeply invested in understanding the main character than any other biography i have read. i feel feel like this character louisa adams came alive for me and remains with me more than any other character in any book that i've read this year. i think luis it made so many fascinating decisions in this book, for me, the most interesting was the decision to explore the shifting of this character's mind, as much as she was exploring that fascinating facts of her life. i'm looking forward to talk about that decision and all of the other ones that were made.

just as an introduction the story of loser adams they followed her through her giddy, romantic meeting with john quincy adams if it can be described as such the character. and then followed her to berlin, russia and then back to washington where she was the wife of a president. and then it's great to talk about it. one of the the things i wanted to ask you right off the bat since the theme of the night as louisa is whether the fact that the character's name is luisa jury you to your book and what was interesting about that? >> i think it is true that i did pick it up quicker than i did of her name was jane. beyond that it was quince it is. i do think when you are writing about historical figure you cannot imagine getting inside their head, but you do need a crack of the window into the room that they are standing.

for me probably sharing the name which i don't know many louisa's, so this probably was a little bit of a window opener. >> i think for me my name had to do with who i became as a person, i was interested about the fact that my name was louisa growing up. do you think her name affected her personality. >> it was a common name at the time, more common than it is now. in fact in berlin and everybody was named louisa, the queen was louisa, all the duchesses and royalty, everybody so i think it was not quite so uncommon. i was making a joke, i actually feel much more comfortable answering the question about the

character's name because we actually went to college together and we have background of highway new each other each other people used to think i was her. so before i met her i had a sense of -- people still think i'm hurt when people know that my name is louisa and i'm a writer they complement me. thank you. i worked hard on the. [laughter] >> i do think this louisa in particular has to make her own identity in a lot of ways. i think we're probably in the throw than she was. >> the other thing that fascinated me about this book i it read like a novel. i felt like i was in a world that was somehow fictional. i tried to put my hand on what

caused that feeling. been swept off on a fictional story even though you're telling the facts of a real person. one of the things i was thinking with it is she moves through such novelistic settings in her life. she starts her life in the drying rooms of england jockeying for a husband that she is in snowy saint petersburg and that she comes back to america in the early days of the republic, i wondered what kind of strategy you used in order to make this biography feel like a novel and that was a conscious decision you made. >> i definitely tried to balance storytelling with being true to being across the idea that brought historical context i definitely kept in mind not take calculated about how she was

feeling. she is really unusual and that she talks so much about her feelings and her thoughts. where a figure at that time so people at that time were not talking like that. they also didn't have feelings in the same way. we all have feelings that if only we could admit it anyway, i do think that she was not always the best interpreter of her own feelings but they were on the page and you could look at that in context. so so she gave me so much material to work with. at the same time i wanted to be a great story and it was. and i wanted it town fold as it happens and i wanted the idea, i

didn't want it to be written from up block and undigested, never going to talk about how women were regarded. i wanted it all to be how the whole thing grows so it's in there and rooted so what we get is actually -- i also did read some novels and i had some in mind and i thought of it in three parts. she was born in the same years as jane alda. i do think, i went back and

reread things i learned something from it that was important. i learned not to read the romantic novels that i had in high school but to pay attention to the financial language in the novels. the way they talked about marriages and contracts or. that help me understand something which is that they went bankrupt right after she got married and she was devastated. when she's devastated by is the fact that -- she goes back year after year it's like a trauma that she is not able to get over. it constantly reopens. i that this was her crazy and i refer to it as her crazy. but that was the way they

described it and then you go back and read some of these novels and you realize everybody has a price take and that actually if you couldn't pay it was grounds for getting out of a marriage. i had to go back and reread parts. he says i'm doing my duty and you realize the thought had crossed his mind that he had to decide to stay in that marriage. this was destabilizing. i don't think i i would've appreciated it quite the same way had i not been able to put that fertilizer in the soil. and then she is in st. petersburg during the war,

again, you take can't take too much from it but you can kind of get the feeling of it. actually the book that was really important i don't remember how it was but it was written at the same time and he was a beautiful writer, i wish i could remember his name because everyone should read it, it's a new new york review book. i'll figure out if you e-mail me. and that often helped get the feeling of the place. and then these were not preachers, to get the feel of how to tell a story.

what i was really after is john quincy was interested in facts and dates and what happens in and then when you had someone and what she was interested in was not being the emotional landscape. so they had two contemporaneous journeys, the actual journey of her life, she thought one of her memoirs and then the other one and she grow so much. that to me was one of the most exciting things about her is how much she change. i did not want to write a biography about such and such and how they became who they are. she was this dynamic changing, growing figure.

she is not a stable element in that way, i wanted to map that growth. >> that was that was something that comes through really clearly in the book, just how mysterious a character she is and how changeable she is, how flexible she is. also just how invested she is in learning her own voice. she seems like a character character she wrote three different memoirs, she drove wrote lots of memoirs, each letter is written in a very different voice. some time complaining and hyper contract another time she's incredibly sensitive. an intellectual. other time she's laughing. so it does feel like there is a record of her voice but also a record of her many voices. i wondered reading it if that was a complicated thing as a writer to track this person who

seemed to have so many different voices and is yet so invested in finding her voice and whether you felt if you got to know her by the end of the process or whether she eluded you until the end. >> i definitely felt like i got to know her like one of my friends. her i read some of her letters in their very vivid and how funny which is not something i normally think earlier people being an how insightful. when you look at jefferson and the presidents, so i do think the development of the voice was very important. i actually read her earlier letters a little bit later. her letter is one incredibly run-on sentence about how she hates writing. at her second sentence is how

she's never going to work like this. she often talked about how she hated to write. >> but this is partly a story about her becoming a writer, not not a published writer, although she did publish some of her poems. and she became somewhat proud of her writings. i think the insight that she had these different voices is important. she is a complicated person, she actually wrote a satire of washington and she called herself lady sharply. she described lady sharply is being the compound of warmth and cold. humor and serious stuff. she's right.

she's kind of driven by the intentions and paradoxes. at the same time they add up to something very deeply human. that both made it easier to understand where all of these were coming from and also obviously. >> i love that about her. i feel like i had more questions about her by the end of the novel than i did in the beginning. i mean i'm sorry. that's terrible. >> so i guess my last question the maybe we can open to the audience, it just has to do with one of these complicating factors in her personality which is she really rose to the role of leader in the early republic in a magnificent way. in some ways you can make the argument

that she was responsible for the success of her husband's political career. she was incredibly sharp and intelligent but at the same time she is quite retiring and seems to fully ask backed a woman's place to be subservient to her husband or start a lockdown on her husband. one of her three memoirs was an adventure of nobody. she fully embraces her nothingness and her smallness like her humility. so i think now that we tend to look at the female heroines and rise above that somehow magically managed to be bold and brave and have no doubt despite the fact that they are educated in every way and to try to be humble. i just wondered how you felt about her between humility and

extreme courage and whether that was part of what you saw. >> absolutely. this is one of the ways in which we really do have to understand the past is not like her present. people want her to be something she's not. they want her to be a modern woman, and about how strong she was and she wasn't. this is a woman who made a 2000-mile journey from st. petersburg to paris with her 7-year-old son and halfway through she pretends to be napoleon's sister. she is amazing. she survived a lot. at the same time she was insecure, she she was fragile,

she was sick all the time. she was a complicated person. actually in some ways i think it was straining and a little bit liberating. her husband was very self serious. he knew that he was born for the nation in the end important role to play he had to see these great things and she didn't have to feel that way. she didn't have to be this american icon she could just be herself. she was taking things seriously including herself. she laughed at everybody else and she laughed at herself and there is a way in which her insecurity was very much a part of who she was and something would be lost if she had more kind of like i'm a boss.

i think the paradox between her accepting the constriction in her life and at the same time working against her is really important. she wrote an account of that journey and she wanted people to read it in some ways because it's a great story she's a great writer. but she wrote and she said because she wants to be remembered for one who was. she was worried about being forgotten. at the same time she made it universal. she was writing to show what a woman could do and she says something that really stayed with me that we must never desert ourselves. >> is there any questions?

[inaudible] [inaudible] >> sure. i think one of the great parts of history and with john quincy adams, i do think, one of the threads in the book is about her own intimacy and slavery to a degree. [inaudible]

that's not why i probably approach this book. although i'm drawn to people, this is probably answering your question in a different way, this. in which it was first real and populous rising, part of the way in which they negotiated that is quite interesting. trying to figure out how the country was changing and what kind of relationship have people it was a -- i think we tend to

think the early republic new what they were doing and were sort of handed this perfect document, in fact everybody disagreed about everything. they were arguing all the time, everybody was making compromises and one of the exciting things about meeting her was that you get that. she was not trying to reflect the world, she wanted the world to see it, it was just kinda hopeful. >> [inaudible conversation] was jefferson writing about her. >> there are people still writing about her.

>> with her being some people wrote a denise wrote a wonderful tribute about how appealing she was. people wrote about her parties. there is a lot of that in letters, people were drawn to her. and they tended to reflect that. >> how do you see the role of the first lady being different in the early republic versus how

we see them now. >> it was quite different. one of the interesting things about louisa's life is that her time in the white house was a low point in her life. there wasn't any precedent for an active role for the first lady. as a campaigner she actually looked at the rollout of first ladies do now, she was being a surrogate figure in kinda making up for some of the flaws and shortcomings of her spouse. you can't draw straight line because now for a long time and

partly because she was so forward and criticized for being so forward that role disappeared in fact she was punished for it in some ways, one of the reasons when she got to the white house she wrote about this, she was too visible so she had to step back. there's complicated thing in the administration that had some consequences and women in washington, there had been a growing movement, people were interested in women rights and that sort of shut down in the 1820s. especially there is women were not elevated. there are hall called angel of

the hearts and all these things and that's how it started around the time that john quincy was president. and the role that women could play even in washington. so it's not like she set the example for other first ladies. >> [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] >> where she had known when she was in the white house. >> she was very sensitive that you cannot be too aristocratic in the united states.

she said she had to pretend she was not a travel lady. so there is a kind of suspicion that was already to occur and she sort of had didn't care and on the other hand she knew how far she could go. the campaign in 1828 was very vicious. she was accused of a sex scandal essentially. and at the same time the adams can't and interjections wife not having divorced but it was complicated. it was very vicious. i i think

we think of it as politics is a very simple and actually it was not very nice. >> was their particular period of her life her episode in her life or aspect of her life that your frustrated about any that would be more interesting to go in more detail on. >> that's a great question. certainly slavery is one of the things that i became most interested in and it was frustrating because i had set this record and legal documents to suggest one thing so keeping together, kick talk about her attitude because she does start

talk about slavery later. but they kind it went silent and i felt frustrated in those moments for sure. but she herself led a vibrant record, it's not like a lot of women of those time, they burn their letters. she would burn her letters and people didn't burn her letters. she would some times right at the bottom of her letters burn this. [laughter] but i feel very lucky to have the subject that's a good

question. i would would have to think about that. and come back with a better answer for you later. >> [applause]. [inaudible] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation]

[inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] >> mary catherine hamm, co-author of end of discussion, what is the outrage industry that you refer to the subtitle. >> guest: oh one of the things we talk about in this book and in the discussion is that every single thing becomes a thing. it is driven by social media, it starts on college campuses and it's these very tiny slights, the wrong word at the wrong time that everybody gets into a tizzy about. i think it ends up being a lot of pressure on everyday people for how they talk about issues